This invention relates to a telephone system and method which allows a subscriber to remotely identify calls to the subscriber's phones.
The ability to remotely identify phone calls placed to one's home or business is of increasing importance for allowing people the mobility to work from both home and business, and to travel while still keeping in touch with callers to home or business. Currently a phone user can remotely identify calls to his phone if the phone user subscribes to a voice mail system (VMS) service and has a voice mail account. If callers have called and left voice mail messages, the user may listen to these messages by placing a call to the voice mail service and then accessing the messages. Typically, the phone user accesses messages by listening to prompting messages, and then choosing options such as an option to play a message or delete a message. The phone user typically would input his choice of options using the keypad of a touch tone phone.
However, if the caller hangs up before leaving a voice mail message, the phone user will not be able to identify that caller. Often a caller is unwilling to wait until the phone user's greeting message ends to leave a message and will hang up. A phone user may still wish to know the identity of the caller who hung up. Alternatively, the caller may simply not leave enough information in the caller's voice mail message for the phone user to identify the caller, and the phone user will then have little way of identifying the caller and returning a call to the caller. Furthermore, if the phone user is accessing the VMS from outside the local calling area, the user may incur long distance charges.
Switched telephone networks also may provide information about callers to a phone user. For example, a Visual Call Display (or simply Call Display) can be provided by Advanced Intelligent Networks (AIN), i.e., switched telephone networks with advanced services. The phone user may subscribe to a Call Display service, where the phone user can identify callers who have left messages on the user's phone by means of a display on the phone. In this case, the user does not remotely identify the callers, but must instead return to the location of the phone itself to retrieve information on the identity of the caller. However, it is often inconvenient for a phone user to return to his home or office to determine who has called.